A Blog about Digital Marketing and Mobile Apps

So, how do you know who your ideal customers are and where they hangout on the internet?

Imagine knowing the social media handles that your ideal customers use, the kind of post they engage with and their intentions when they query search engines. Awesome right.

All you will need to do is serve them the content you know they already like and leverage data from factors that affect their decision making processes to sell to them.

In this post, i will be explaining how you can answer the question above by leveraging audience research. It will help you understand your audience, their preferences, how to create a more engaging experience and how to satisfy them.

In terms of digital marketing ( for your ideal customers), we hear a lot of jargon’s from keywords, to conversion, SEO, user experience which is like a whole load of information. Basically, they all translate to one central person which is “your ideal audience”.

The essential thing is, you want to know how you can attract, engage convert and retain your leads through your sales funnel till they eventually become paying customers.

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Audience research was once a thing mainly for the big shot companies because they could afford to carry out market research. Due to the financial implications, most businesses would rather not indulge in such an expensive venture.

But with the emergence of digital marketing, all forms of businesses whether small scale or large scale; all have equal competing opportunities on the internet.

The bottom-line of any good digital marketing strategy is to identify the specific characteristics of your ideal customers, including geographic, demographic, and psycho-graphic variables. The more you know about your audience, the more powerful your digital marketing efforts will become.

In Rand Fishkin’s opinion, success can be achieved in the first place by knowing what your ideal customers want before you actually go through the effort to create strategies.

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Discovering the appropriate target market is one of the most important stages of planning a digital marketing campaign. Researching about the target market directs you on where a budget will be focused and how to go about a campaign.

Your ideal customers can be people of a certain age group, gender, marital status, geography, interests, social class, occupation, ethnicity and more. Another consideration is whether the target audience is to be Business to Business (B2B) or Business to Consumer (B2C).

To be honest your ideal customers can be quite wide, say all adults 18+, or very targeted, say single men -25-34 who live in Abuja and earn #800,000 plus in a year.

It is essential to become familiar with your target market media habits and media consumption. For example- are they social media users, do they respond to banner advertising or do they love competitions and giveaways online?

Do they consume their media in the morning, on their lunch break or in the evening after work? These are all relevant questions to enable you understand the person(s) your creating that product or service for.

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Analysis of the current state of play within your clients market is necessary, if it has not already been done. This would include what do current consumers think of the product, service, brand as well as which other companies are competing for customer loyalty within the same market.

Plus who would you like to potentially capture as a new audience for your product or service?

It is essential to consider your target market as a core part of digital marketing strategy. It helps to direct budget, set objectives and define end results.

Without knowing your target audience strategies and campaigns can become incoherent, unfocused, difficult, ineffective and expensive.

If you haven’t done audience research to help guide the growth of your business, here is a look at how its importance for your business to enable you achieve your marketing and financial goals.

Audience research enables you unravel your ideal customers concerns

Understanding your audience has profound implications for your marketing strategy and beyond. From the perspective of developing your content and SEO strategy, it helps you answer vital questions such as: who are your customers?

What are their most urgent and pressing concerns? What factors are they focused on in terms of making a buying decision.
This information helps you decide what strategy will reach them most effectively on every point from design and copy to keyword research and content deployment. A digital strategy should start off with a clear understanding of who the audience is.

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Building personas and segments into the program ensures your content will be relevant to the customer. Your digital strategy needs to be informed by a shared understanding of who your customers are, how they perceive the interactions they’re having with your company today, and what they want and need from your company in the future.

The next stage is to find out where your audience is active online – search, websites, apps and social media. Use audience research to see which channels they’re using.

For example, if you conduct your audience research and recognize your leads hangout more on Facebook, it means the most of your campaign will be directed towards Facebook.

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Remember that the way your audience uses social media will change over their journey. Therefore, it’s important to keep connecting with them at each stage of the journey, using an omni-platform approach to provide compelling content and solutions that holds their interest and keeps them engaged.

Put yourself in your audiences’ shoes (use audience research to do this) – what does a prospective, current or former customer want to see from you online?

What else is going on in their lives that could be distracting them from engaging with you, but could provide a great opportunity for you to recapture their attention with a compelling content strategy that’s more aligned to their needs and less to your own?

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These are some valid questions that will enable you understand your ideal audience and gives you an idea on how to manipulate your digital marketing strategy to suit your audience interest and needs.

It gives you a more direct focus in regards to your content

Determining how your audience finds your site, what they read, and more is the core of a successful content marketing strategy.

Once you know and understand the needs and interest of your leads, it would be less of an issue crafting out targeted content that will add value to them.

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There won’t be any need to get worried about writing without having people read because you already know what your audience or customer wants.

Neil Patel said if you can’t write something great for yourself, there’s no way you can write something great for any other audience.

Gives you an idea of the keywords that are likely going to attract organic traffic

The word keyword basically relates to what your leads consistently search for and this is what helps search engines either put you on the first or last page based on the relevance of your keyword.

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Understanding what keywords matter for your space and how people are currently finding your site is invaluable information.

With your audience research, you can find out what your customer persona search most often for and what type of information they are seeking.

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It helps you improve on your current digital marketing strategy for your existing customers

You can’t ditch your current and loyal customers just because you are looking for more customers.

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Hence, an audience research comes in handy when it comes to your existing customers as you can find out was to re-strategize and make them engage better with your product or service.

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A/B testing for your ideal customers

A/B testing is a kind of data gathering that lets you determine what’s most effective for reaching your audience. It can focus on e-newsletter headlines, designs for the landing page of your website, or the specific copy of a call to action.

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By pitting two options against each other, you’re able to determine which performs better and make incremental improvements to your website and overall marketing strategy.

Conclusion

This process might take a little time but it’s worth the effort. It’s not a ‘one time’ job either. Audience research also makes use of tools that help businesses gather information about their audience.

There are a range of software’s and services available to enable market research teams to scan and monitor mentions of their brand, relevant keywords and key phrases, and even their competitors.

Research and digital marketing is going hand-in-hand to drive forward the best ways to monitor, collect, analyze and interpret data to boost business’ understanding of their target markets and tailor their strategies effectively.

These strategies can now be tweaked in ‘real time’ as results of their effectiveness are fed through swiftly – making campaigns more flexible and reactive than ever before.

It’s definitely not hidden that knowing your audience allows you understand how to create a more effective digital marketing strategy and also a more interactive brand, product or service.

Therefore, you can share with me some interesting truths you must have discovered after an audience research.

Daniel Obaike is an Entrepreneur who likes to help organizations 'WIN'. He is very passionate about assisting Organizations in Africa and other emerging economies boost revenue, achieve sustainable growth and enhance competition by utilizing Online Marketing.

About
Daniel Obaike

Daniel Obaike is an Entrepreneur who likes to help organizations 'WIN'. He is very passionate about assisting Organizations in Africa and other emerging economies boost revenue, achieve sustainable growth and enhance competition by utilizing Online Marketing.

Comments

Digital strategy can take many forms but ultimately it should be focused on the relationships between mainly three things such as Capabilities, Audiences and Channels. Good nature of strategy play vital role to get momentum in online marketing of any niche business. We should really try to establishment of better relationship with our customers as well as audience for better achievement. Eventually, thanks for sharing your ideology in detail pertaining to amazing topic.

Most businesses focus more on the product or service they are selling ignoring or sidelining their audience; that is understanding their audience to create only products or services that suits their needs. The idea behind audience research is as utmost as the product, service or content they share. Thanks for also sharing with me your thoughts on the topic.